Until students come up to you earnestly, asking “what is the purpose of learning this?”

This is already happening in CS and math.

That is why schools should have physical punishments. "What is the purpose of learning this? What a stupid question? To not get additional lashes, obviously"

Isn't that just API? We had them. Reddit/Zillow/Wells Fargo/etc restricted theirs due to business reasons, not technical ones.

Chess is completely deterministic too. Please play the perfect game.

Not sure how that maps to software engineering at all. Seems more like a straw man, did you read my comment at all or just the first words? My point is that the mostly deterministic machine is very much not "imperfect" and doesn't need to be cuddled and watered to work. You simply write code, and if you're like a LITTLE BIT careful, it works super well. It's really not rocket science.

Nobody has to make the perfect program, but we can't chalk it up to "the world isn't perfect" when I click the windows start menu and it opens empty (an existing bug btw)

Exactly, we all know the merits of Esperanto, but few have switched away from English.

Will the model even be competitive in 10 months though? Seems like models that reach top 20 on OpenRouter see 50% of all token spend by day 80, and 80% by day 180.

As long as the hardware can be used on newer models, hardware costs can be recouped running a future model.

But if they're hoping to recoup non-recurring engineering costs rather than just hardware costs, they do need to consider the useful lifetime of the specific model.